Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in ZAKA, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team.
(Oct. 24, 2026 / JNS)
It should not be necessary to explain to a sane citizen why he ought to care that other men want him dead, that others want to take what he has spent his life building or why the two have joined forces.
That the explanation has become necessary tells you something about the particular anesthesia of American life in the autumn of 2026. Iran is 6,000 miles away and appears to be losing. The Democratic Socialists of America gathered in Chicago this past summer and it looked like a curiosity, a few thousand young people in a rented hall with flags, resolutions and a mailing list.
Americans have not attempted to reckon with the alliance of these two forces, because they initially seem so antagonistic.
Iran looks like a story that is ending: The currency has collapsed. Food inflation has run past 70%. Protests have touched all 31 provinces. The web of terror proxies that Tehran spent 40 years and untold billions constructing has been largely shredded from Beirut to Sanaa. The old Supreme Leader is gone. Hopefully, this tyrannical government is dying.
What is not dying is the idea that this government spent four decades exporting. Revolutionary Islamism was never confined to the borders of the Islamic Republic, and never depended on the survival of any particular ayatollah. Tehran functioned as a venture fund for a radically Islamist worldview that has successfully metastasized across the globe.
It funded madrassas, cultural centers, student associations, NGOs and media properties across five continents. Those investments have long since matured into independent enterprises with their own revenue, leadership and recruits.
Iran and its Islamist offshoots aren’t the only ones who want you dead. Iran has taught several million people, most of whom have never seen Iran and never will, to want you dead. Their vocabulary comes from Iran: the Great Satan and the Little Satan, the West as a predatory civilization, the Jew as the organizing principle of everything wrong with the world. Whether the Iranian regime survives or falls, the catechism has already been distributed to significant parts of the Muslim world and to numerous useful idiots in the West.
As for the Democratic Socialists of America, it counted roughly 6,000 members in 2015. It now counts more than 100,000. Its members run the largest city in the United States. Its endorsed candidates hold six seats on the Chicago City Council and a bloc in the New York State Legislature. It maintains associate status in the São Paulo Forum, the hemispheric body founded by leftists Fidel Castro and Lula da Silva, and full affiliation with Progressive International.
This is not a debating society. It is an organized and aggressive political faction with international attachments, a dues base in the millions of dollars and a demonstrated capacity to win primaries.
Whether they take your life, your business or your ability to say what you believe, the target is the same.
The nervous American voter tells himself this is a blip, a generational mood that will pass when the mortgage payments start. The Democratic establishment tells itself something worse: The energy can be harnessed, the young radicals can be brought inside the big tent and housebroken and a party apparatus that survived Henry Wallace and the New Left will absorb them too.
But the Democratic Party is being repurposed. Capturing a 200-year-old American party is not about governing a few cities well; it is about acquiring the institutional legitimacy, ballot access, donor network, and media deference that a fringe movement could never build on its own.
This is where the two stories become one.
On paper, the alliance between Islamists and socialists is absurd. Revolutionary Islamism executes homosexuals, while Western progressivism has made their protection a defining moral commitment. Islamism subordinates women by law and modesty police, while the DSA platform is putatively feminist to its foundations. Islamism claims divine authority and demands submission to a theocratic order, while Marxism rejects God and claims to seek liberation from hierarchy. One venerates revelation, the other revolution. These movements should be at each other’s throats.
In fact, there is a close kinship between them. Both promise liberation while demanding submission. Both sanctify the collective over the individual. Both treat dissent as illegitimate rather than merely mistaken. Both hold that coercion becomes righteous when wielded on behalf of a higher truth.
Their gods, doctrines and intended social orders are profoundly different. But they are not different enough to keep them from becoming comrades, because what they share is the conviction that society must be remade to fit an absolute ideology.
Their alliance does not prove that their ideologies are identical. It proves that their differences matter less to them than their common appetites for the destruction of the West and control over the ruins.
Both divide the world into oppressors and oppressed. Both cast the West as inherently oppressive, America as the engine of global exploitation and Israel as the West’s most visible and vulnerable proxy. Within that shared framework, doctrinal differences cease to matter. The two groups need no common theology, only a common enemies list, and they have one.
The Islamist side supplies the grievances, theological absolutism and willingness to die. The socialist side supplies the language of justice, academic credentials, institutional access, legal defense funds and political respectability. Red and green together are enormously more dangerous than either apart, because each supplies exactly what the other lacks.
The threat of this alliance arrives in stages. It arrives as the Jewish student who learns which routes across campus to avoid and which pin not to wear. It arrives as the synagogue that now budgets more for armed security than for its religious school. It arrives as the religiously or ideologically heretical small business owner whose landlord is told by an activist group that renting to him is complicity. It arrives as the professional who understands, without anyone saying it aloud, that a private opinion will end a career. It arrives as the tax and regulatory regime that treats accumulated property as presumptively illegitimate and its holder as presumptively guilty.
It arrives, at the far end, as the small team with rifles and zip ties at a Jewish community center, produced by the climate the earlier stages made possible.
Whether they take your life, your business or your ability to say what you believe out loud in the country you were born in, the mechanism is the same, and the target is the same. It is that which you hold most dear, and the movement in question has told you repeatedly and in public that it intends to have it.
This is not theoretical, a foreign policy abstraction for specialists or a campus phase to be waited out. It is a coalition with money, institutions, elected officials and a growing share of one of America’s two governing parties. It is personal; it is patient; and it is coming to a town near you.